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Still need to find out if he's into girls or boys: Victor (Michael Cimino)
Photo: ddp / INTERTOPICS / LMKMEDIA Ltd.
The new student from slightly precarious circumstances who first has to find his place among the jolly
rich kids
- check.
The crush scene in the school hallway in which someone drinks from a water dispenser fountain in slow motion - check.
The annoying father who is very friendly towards his children and who all viewers hate - check.
The bingo card with common high school series topoi stamps itself in the first episodes of the Disney + series "Love, Victor".
So Victor ends up at a new school after the family move and still doesn't know exactly how to find it.
Conveniently, his new sidekick, who grins Harry-Styles-like Felix, lives next door, and he even envies Victor for his chance to start over at the new school.
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The nasty sayings in the locker room are comparatively harmless with "Love, Victor"
Photo: ddp / INTERTOPICS / LMKMEDIA Ltd.
Quasi as a blank canvas, while everyone else is fixed in their stereotyped roles.
"All of our fate was determined years ago," moans Felix, and one still hopes to have gotten into one of those clever series variants that willingly yield to their own genre, but at least occasionally nudge them on a meta-like second level .
And one hopes for a bit of rough anger between all the vanilla storylines - after all, Victor writes an Instagram message right at the beginning to Simon, who is personally unknown to him, which he ends with a snotty "Screw you".
"Love, Victor" is a series spin-off from "Love, Simon", the coming-out dramedy from 2018. One of the biggest criticisms of this film adaptation of Becky Albertalli's book "Only Three Words" is taken by Victor right at the beginning of the first series episode: Too white, too privileged, too smooth, the story ran for Simon until the final boy smooch in the Ferris wheel.
Not everyone has such liberal, understanding parents and helpful friends as he does, says Victor, on the other hand, who is afraid of talking to his Puerto Rican, conservative parents about his current uncertainty, whether he is exclusively about boys or maybe also feels attracted to girls: "For some of us it's not so easy."
In the course of the ten 30-minute episodes, Simon, who attended the same school as Victor but has since moved to New York, develops into a kind of digital tutor.
Still, it was the scariest thing for him to find out who he really was, Simon defends his comparatively soft experiences.
But even Victor is not played so badly in the episode: The obligatory homophobic dressing room gossip of the sports cracks is comparatively harmless, and there is an openly gay student who doesn't seem to have any major problems with his classmates in everyday life.
For young people who are actually insulted and discriminated against, this should seem like a smirky utopia and, as far as the external struggles apart from the internal emotional vortex, are not really an offer of identification.
From an optimistic point of view, one could understand the message of the series aimed at a different target group.
Namely as "Look here, everything is normal" for insecure parents or classmates of queer children.
The merit of “Love, Simon” was also mainly to cover a gay love story with the same enamel and kitsch cherry without further ado as one would have done according to the more usual boy-meets-girl pattern.
This means that »Love, Victor« fits well into the more classic series grid of the new Disney branch Star, which starts together with the series under the Disney + banner.
The group wants to attract an audience beyond families with children.
As a result, series like "Grey's Anatomy" and "The X-Files" are available here.
The idea of "Love, Victor" is easy to combine over the length of the series.
Even if the series was originally intended to be produced directly for Disney + and was postponed in the USA to the streaming service Hulu, which also has content for young adults - apparently out of concern that the topic could scare the Disney audience.
It is only the beautiful dialogues that save the series from moving too predictably within the dramaturgical and stylistic genre boundaries.
And the makers keep sprinkling in contemporary markers that will later make the series easy to date.
When Victor is not sure whether he is about to fall unexpectedly in love with the girl Mia after all, he compares this experience with the taste experience of a prominent vegan burger that he would never have thought before that he could actually taste .
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